“No doubt. No doubt.” He squinted at Avluela. “Who’s this? Watchers are celebates, no?”

  “She is nothing more than a traveling companion.”

  The Sentinel guffawed coarsely. “It’s a route you travel often, I wager! Not that there’s much to her. What is she, thirteen, fourteen? Come here, child. Let me check you for contraband.” He ran his hands quickly over her, scowling as he felt her breasts, then raising an eyebrow as he encountered the mounds of her wings below her shoulders. “What’s this? What’s this? More in back than in front! A Flier, are you? Very dirty business, Fliers consorting with foul old Watchers.” He chuckled and put his hand on Avluela’s body in a way that sent Gormon starting forward in fury, murder in his fire-circled eyes. I caught him in time and grasped his wrist with all my strength, holding him back lest he ruin the three of us by an attack on the Sentinel. He tugged at me, nearly pulling me over; then he grew calm and subsided, icily waiting as the fat one finished checking Avluela for “contraband.”

  At length the Sentinel turned in distaste to Gormon and said, “What kind of thing are you?”

  “Guildless, your mercy,” Gormon said in sharp tones. “The humble and worthless product of teratogenesis, and yet nevertheless a free man who desires entry to Roum.”

  “Do we need more monsters here?”

  “I eat little and work hard.”

  “You’d work harder still if you were neutered,” said the Sentinel.

  Gormon glowered. I said, “May we have entry?”

  “A moment.” The Sentinel donned his thinking cap and narrowed his eyes as he transmitted a message to the memory tanks. His face tensed with the effort; then it went slack, and moments later came the reply. We could not hear the transaction at all, but from his disappointed look it appeared evident that no reason had been found to refuse us admission to Roum.

  “Go on in,” he said. “The three of you. Quickly!”

  We passed beyond the gate.

  Gormon said, “I could have split him open with a blow.”

  “And be neutered by nightfall. A little patience, and we’ve come into Roum.”

  “The way he handled her-!”

  “You take a very possessive attitude toward Avluela,” I said. “Remember that she’s a Flier, and not sexually available to the guildless.”

  Gormon ignored my thrust. “She arouses me no more than you do, Watcher. But it pains me to see her treated that way. I would have killed him if you hadn’t held me back.”

  Avluela said, “Where shall we stay, now that we’re in Roum?”

  “First let me find the headquarters of my guild,” I said. “I’ll register at the Watchers’ Inn. After that perhaps we’ll hunt up the Fliers’ Lodge for a meal.”

  “And then,” said Gormon drily, “we’ll go to the Guildless Gutter and beg for coppers.”

  “I pity you because you are a Changeling,” I told him, “but I find it ungraceful of you to pity yourself. Come.”

  We walked up a cobbled, winding street away from the gate and into Roum itself. We were in the outer ring of the city, a residential section of low, squat houses topped by the unwieldy bulk of defense installations. Within lay the shining towers we had seen from the fields the night before; the remnant of ancient Roum, carefully preserved across ten thousand years or more; the market; the factory zone; the communications hump; the temples of the Will; the memory tanks; the sleepers’ refuges; the out-worlders’ brothels; the governmental buildings; the headquarters of the various guilds.

  At the corner, beside a Second Cycle building with walls of some rubbery texture, I found a public thinking cap and slipped it on my forehead. At once my thoughts raced down the conduit until they came to the interface that gave them access to one of the storage brains of a memory tank. I pierced the interface and saw the wrinkled brain itself, pale gray against the deep green of its housing. A Rememberer once told me that in cycles past men built machines to do their thinking for them, although these machines were hellishly expensive and required vast amounts of space and drank power like gluttons. That was not the worst of our forefathers’ follies; but why build artificial brains when death each day liberates scores of splendid natural ones to hook into the memory tanks? Was it that they lacked the knowledge to use them? I find that hard to believe.

  I gave the brain my guild identification and asked the coordinates of our inn. Instantly I received them, and we set out, Avluela on one side of me, Gormon on the other, myself wheeling as always the cart in which my instruments reside.

  The city was crowded. I had not seen such throngs in sleepy, heat-fevered Agupt, nor at any other point on my northward journey. The streets were full of Pilgrims, secretive and masked. Jostling through them went busy Rememberers and glum Merchants and now and then the litter of a Master. Avluela saw a number of Fliers, but was barred by the tenets of her guild from greeting them until she had undergone her ritual purification. I regret to say that I spied many Watchers, all of whom looked upon me disdainfully and without welcome. I noted a good many Defenders and ample representation of such lesser guilds as Vendors, Servitors, Manufactories, Scribes, Communicants and Transporters. Naturally, a host of neuters went silently about their humble business, and numerous outworlders of all descriptions flocked the streets, most of them probably tourists, some here to do what business could be done with the sullen, poverty-blighted people of Earth. I noticed many Changelings limping furtively through the crowd, not one of them as proud of bearing as Gormon beside me. He was unique among his kind; the others, dappled and piebald and asymmetrical, limbless or overlimbed, deformed in a thousand imaginative and artistic ways, were slinkers, squinters, shufflers, hissers, creepers; they were cut-purses, brain-drainers, organ-peddlers, repentance-mongers, gleam-buyers, but none held himself upright as though he thought he were a man.

  The guidance of the brain was exact, and in less than an hour of walking we arrived at the Watchers’ Inn. I left Gormon and Avluela outside and wheeled my cart within.

  Perhaps a dozen members of my guild lounged in the main hall. I gave them the customary sign, and they returned it languidly. Were these guardians on whom Earth’s safety depended? Simpletons and weaklings!

  “Where may I register?” I asked.

  “New? Where from?”

  “Agupt was my last place of registry.”

  “Should have stayed there. No need of Watchers here.”

  ‘Where may I register?“

  A foppish youngster indicated a screen in the rear of the great room. I went to it, pressed my fingertips against it, was interrogated and gave my name, which a Watcher may utter only to another Watcher and within the precincts of an inn. A panel shot open, and a puffy-eyed man who wore the Watcher emblem on his right cheek and not on the left, signifying his high rank in the guild, spoke my name and said, “You should have known better than to come to Roum. We’re over our quota.”

  “I claim lodging and employment nonetheless.”

  “A man with your sense of humor should have been born into the guild of Clowns,” he said.

  “I see no joke.”

  “Under laws promulgated by our guild in the most recent session an inn is under no obligation to take new lodgers once it has reached its assigned capacity. We are at our assigned capacity. Farewell, my friend.”

  I was aghast. “I know of no such regulation! This is incredible! For a guild to turn away a member from its own inn—when he arrives footsore and numb, a man of my age, having crossed Land Bridge out of Agupt, here as a stranger and hungry in Roum—”

  “Why did you not check with us first?”

  “I had no idea it would be necessary.”

  “The new regulations—”

  “May the Will shrivel the new regulations!” I shouted. “I demand lodging! For one who has Watched since before you were born to be turned away—”

  “Easy, brother, easy.”

  “Surely you have some corner where I can sleep—some crumbs to let me eat—”

  Even as my tone had changed from bluster to supplication, his expression softened from indifference to mere disdain. “We have no room, we have no food. These are hard times for our guild, you know. There is talk that we will be disbanded altogether, as a useless luxury, a drain upon the Will’s resources. We are very limited in our abilities. Because Roum has a surplus of Watchers, we all are on short rations as it is, and if we admit you our rations will be all the shorter.”

  “But where will I go? What shall I do?”

  “I advise you,” he said blandly, “to throw yourself upon the mercy of the Prince of Roum.”

  * * *

  FOUR

  Outside, I told that to Gormon, and he doubled with laughter, guffawing so furiously that the striations on his lean cheeks blazed like bloody stripes. “The mercy of the Prince of Roum!” he repeated. “The mercy—of the Prince of Roum—!”

  “It is customary for the unfortunate to seek the aid of the local ruler,” I said coldly.

  “The Prince of Roum knows no mercy,” Gormon told me. “The Prince of Roum will feed you your own limbs to ease your hunger!”

  “Perhaps,” Avluela put in, “we should try to find the Fliers’ Lodge. They’ll feed us there.”

  “Not Gormon,” I observed. ‘We have obligations to one another.“

  “We could bring food out to him,” she said.

  “I prefer to visit the court first,” I insisted. “Let us make sure of our status. Afterward we can improvise living arrangements, if we must.”

  She yielded, and we made our way to the palace of the Prince of Roum, a massive building fronted by a colossal column-ringed plaza, on the far side of the river that splits the city. In the plaza we were accosted by mendicants of many sorts, some not even Earthborn. Something with ropy tendrils and a corrugated noseless face thrust itself at me and jabbered for alms until Gormon pushed it away, and moments later a second creature equally strange, its skin pocked with luminescent craters and its limbs studded with eyes, embraced my knees and pleaded in the name of the Will for my mercy. “I am only a poor Watcher,” I said, indicating my cart, “and am here to gain mercy myself.” But the being persisted, sobbing out its misfortunes in a blurred feathery voice, and in the end, to Gormon’s immense disgust, I dropped a few food tablets into the shelflike pouch on its chest. Then we muscled on toward the doors of the palace. At the portico a more horrid sight presented itself: a maimed Flier, fragile limbs bent and twisted, one wing half unfolded and severely cropped, the other missing altogether. The Flier rushed upon Avluela, called her by a name not hers, moistened her leggings with tears so copious that the fur of them grew matted and stained. “Sponsor me to the lodge,” he appealed. “They have turned me away because I am crippled, but if you sponsor me—” Avluela explained that she could do nothing, that she was a stranger to this lodge. The broken Flier would not release her, and Gormon with great delicacy lifted him like the bundle of dry bones that he was, and set him aside. We stepped up onto the portico and at once were confronted by a trio of soft-faced neuters, who asked our business and admitted us quickly to the next line of barrier, which was manned by a pair of wizened Indexers. Speaking in unison, they queried us.

  “We seek audience,” I said. “A matter of mercy.”

  “The day of audience is four days hence,” said the Indexer on the right. “We will enter your request on the rolls.”

  “We have no place to sleep!” Avluela burst out. “We are hungry! We-”

  I hushed her. Gormon, meanwhile, was groping in the mouth of his overpocket. Bright things glimmered in his hand: pieces of gold, the eternal metal, stamped with hawk-nosed bearded faces. He had found them grubbing in the ruins. He tossed one coin to the Indexer who had refused us. The man snapped it from the air, rubbed his thumb roughly across its shining obverse, and dropped it instantly into a fold of his garment. The second Indexer waited expectantly. Smiling, Gormon gave him his coin.

  “Perhaps,” I said, “we can arrange for a special audience within.”

  “Perhaps you can,” said one of the Indexers. “Go through.”

  And so we passed into the nave of the palace itself, and stood in that great echoing space, looking down the central aisle toward the shielded throne chamber at the apse. There were more beggars in here-licensed ones, holding hereditary concessions—and also throngs of Pilgrims, Communicants, Rememberers, Musicians, Scribes and Indexers. I heard muttered prayers: I smelled the scent of spicy incense; I felt the vibration of subterranean gongs. In cycles past this building had been a shrine of one of the old religions—the Christers, Gormon told me, making me suspect once more that he was a Rememberer masquerading as a Changeling—and it still maintained something of its holy character even though it served as Roum’s seat of secular government. But how were we to get to see the Prince?

  To my left I saw a small ornate chapel to which a line of prosperous-looking Merchants and Land-holders was slowly entering. Peering past them, I noted three skulls mounted on an interrogation fixture—a memory-tank input—and beside them a burly Scribe. Telling Gormon and Avluela to wait for me in the aisle, I joined the line.

  It moved infrequently, and nearly an hour passed before I reached the interrogation fixture. The skulls glared sightlessly at me; within their sealed crania nutrient fluids bubbled and gurgled, caring for the dead yet still functional brains whose billion billion synaptic units now served as incomparable mnemonic devices. The Scribe seemed aghast to find a Watcher in this line, but before he could challenge me I blurted, “I come as a stranger to claim the Prince’s mercy. I and my companions are without lodging. My own guild has turned me away. What shall I do? How may I gain an audience?”

  “Come back in four days.”

  “I’ve slept on the road for more days than that. Now I must rest.”

  “A public inn-”

  “But I am guilded!” I protested. “The public inns would not admit me while my guild maintains an inn here, and my guild refused me because of some new regulation, and—you see my predicament?”

  In a wearied voice the Scribe said, “You may make application for a special audience. It will be denied. But you may apply.”

  “Where?”

  “Here. State your purpose.”

  I identified myself to the skulls by my public designation, listed the names and status of my two companions, and explained my case. All this was absorbed and transmitted to the ranks of brains mounted somewhere in the depths of the city, and when I was done the Scribe said, “If the application is approved, you will be notified.”

  “Meanwhile where shall I stay?”

  “Close to the palace, I would suggest.”

  I understood. I could join that legion of unfortunates packing the plaza. How many of them had requested some special favor of the Prince and were still there, months or years later, waiting to be summoned to the Presence? Sleeping on stone, begging for crusts, living in foolish hope-But I had exhausted my avenues. I returned to Gormon and Avluela, told them of the situation, and suggested that we now attempt to hunt whatever accommodations we could. Gormon, guildless, was welcome at any of the squalid public inns maintained for his kind; Avluela could probably find residence at her own guild’s lodge; only I would have to sleep in the streets, not for the first time. But I hoped that we would not have to separate. I had come to think of us as a family, strange thought though that was for a Watcher.

  As we moved toward the exit my timepiece told me softly that the hour of Watching had come round again. It is my obligation and my privilege to tend to my Watching wherever I may be, regardless of the circumstances, whenever my hour comes round; and so I halted, opened the cart, activated the equipment. Gormon and Avluela stood beside me.

  I saw smirks and open mockery on the faces of those who passed in and out of the palace. Watching is not held in very high repute, for we have Watched so long, and the promised enemy has never come. One has one’s duties, comic though they may seem to others. What is a hollow ritual to some is a life’s work to others. Doggedly I forced myself into a state of Watchfulness. The world melted away from me, and I plunged into the heavens. The familiar joy engulfed me; and I searched the familiar places, and some that were not so familiar, my amplified mind leaping through the galaxies in wild swoops. Was an armada massing? Were troops drilling for the conquest of Earth? Four times a day I watched, and the other members of my guild did the same, each at slightly different hours, so that no moment went by without some vigilant mind on guard. I do not believe that that is a foolish calling.

  When I came up from my trance a brazen voice was crying, “—for the Prince of Roum! Make way for the Prince of Roum!”

  I blinked and caught my breath and fought to shake off the last strands of my concentration. A gilded palanquin had emerged from the rear of the palace and was proceeding down the nave toward me, borne by a phalanx of neuters. Four men in the ornate costumes and brilliant masks of the guild of Masters flanked the litter, and it was preceded by a trio of Changelings, squat and broad, whose throats were so modified as to imitate the sounding-boxes of bullfrogs. They emitted a trumpet-like boom of majestic sound as they advanced.

  It struck me as most strange that a prince would admit Changelings to his service, even ones as gifted as these.

  My cart was blocking the progress of this magnificent procession, and hastily I struggled to close it and move it aside before the parade swept down upon me. Age and fear made my fingers tremble, and I could not make the sealings properly; while I fumbled in increasing clumsiness the strutting Changelings drew so close that the blare of their throats was deafening, and Gormon attempted to aid me, forcing me to hiss at him that it is forbidden for anyone not of my guild to touch the equipment. I pushed him away; and an instant later a vanguard of neuters descended on me and prepared to scourge me from the spot with sparkling whips.

  “In the Will’s name,” I cried, “I am a Watcher!”